Carrot-and-Stick Makes You Dumber and Slower
Read this if you’d like to increase team creativity, productivity with the 21st century motivation
How many of you work with people? How many of you depend on your people to produce results? How many of you would like to create an environment where people are self-motivated, creative, and results oriented?
When people think about motivation, they think of the most obvious model, the carrot and stick model. This is especially true in north America where capitalism rules. True, people are extrinsically motivated. True, people are tuned into wii.fm–’what’s in it for me’–all the time. And true, business have been using it as a motivation mechanism for hundreds of years.
Dan Pink, author of “A Whole New Mind”, gave an eyeopening presentation on the paradox of incentives and results. he asserts that carrot and stick model works in a narrow scope of problems. and it doesn’t work in most others. especially when the problems requires creativity. in fact not only that it doesn’t work, incentives actually make people perform worse. the higher the incentive and worse people perform.
What? That goes against the idea of capitalism. He had my attention.
He further explains that extrinsic motivators–the carrots and sticks–are good for mechanical problems. Problems that have a defined set of rules, narrow focus, and clear roadmap. An example is streamlining a car manufacturing process in an assembly line.
however if the problem is undefined and qualitative–‘big hairy audacious goal’ as Jim Collins would call it–and the solution is on the periphery, the extrinsically based model would crumble. sweeter carrot and sharper stick would just fail. he says, appealing to the intrinsic motivators–autonomy, mastery, and purpose–would accelerate creativity and thinking. an example is Kennedy’s ‘we choose to go to the moon’ challenge.
A la the world is flat and a whole new mind, if you look around, the traditional white collar jobs are being commoditized. the mechanical, tedious type work is being transferred abroad more and more. The high paying jobs today require you to be more creative, more right brain, and more conceptual.
What kind of candle problem does your company have? Are you motivating your people with extrinsically based strategy or intrinsically based strategy?
If you have the kind of problems that require your people to think outside of the box, Dan pink offers 3 winning characteristics:
- Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives,
- Mastery: the desire to do something better and better that matters
- Purpose: the yearning to do what we do and in service for something larger than ourselves
Examples he gave were:
- Google’s 20% time and how this method birthed the likes of Gmail, Google News, Orkut.
- Wikipedia and how it beat Microsoft’s Encarta.
- ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) where workers are held to account for results. Results only. How they deliver the results is irrelevant. Meetings are optional. The consequence is that productivity goes up and turnover goes down.
In my circle I also have 3 successful examples:
- Opportunity Green(www.OpportunityGreen.com): Southern California’s premiere sustainability business conference and community. I was fortunate to be one of the people who started it. And in 3 years Mike Flynn and Karen Solomon has grown it from obscurity to the #1 brand in bringing TOP business people and corporations together for sustainable causes. Get this, almost all the people involved are volunteers.
- Homeless but Not Toothless(http://www.homelessnottoothless.org/): Dr. Jay Grossman’s nonprofit organization that brings dignity back to homeless people through charitable dental work and he is now broadening the mission to foster care children. With the help of Hollywood celebrities and power brokers, HBNT will help thousands more.
- Internet Advertising and Marketing: Most of the companies are virtual. These self-selected and self-motivated people and organizations the driving force to innovative business models that inspired traditional business to be more open and transparent. See Chris Anderson’s book “FREE” for more examples.
What will you do now? Will you be lazy and use the traditional carrot and stick extrinsic motivators or adapt to the scientifically proven intrinsic motivators? How are you going to motivate your people for your “candle problem”? How will you motivate your family, friends, coworkers, community organizations?
Watch the video and let me know what you will do
October 7th, 2009 at 5:02 am
[...] Carrot-and-Stick Makes You Dumber and Slower [...]
replyMay 1st, 2010 at 12:17 am
I wish more people would write blogs like this that are actually fun to read. With all the fluff floating around on the net, it is rare to read a blog like yours instead.
reply